Info from another page

Arkane

Hi,

I want to do a customised page using data from another site. All I need is to take a couple of bits from the other page. Atm I'm using file_get_contents and using a regext to get the bits, but I want to change it to use the DOM.

The info I'm aften all have specific ids and the content varies from being images (which I want the img src of) and spans (where i want the encompased text). Can anyone tell me how I sue the dom?

johanafm

I'd go with DOM (available for PHP 5).

It works pretty much like javascript's dom functionality, with some minor differences.

Arkane

Hey, thanks.
I'm just going along the way - don't really know javascript either (I pretty much learn what I need, no more, no less).

I've played about, and now have this working to an extent.

$dom = new DOMDocument();
@$dom->loadHTML($html);
$rank = $dom->getElementById('ctl00_mainContent_identityStrip_lblRank')->nodeValue;
$emblem = $dom->getElementById('ctl00_mainContent_identityStrip_EmblemCtrl_imgEmblem')->getAttribute('src');

The problem I'm having now is that there is a couple of things I cant figure out. One is that there is an image which doesnt have an id, instead has a class attribute, and i don't know how to find it.
The other is that there is another image which has no attributes other than src, but it is contained within a span with a unique id. I've tried to use xpath, but as far as i can tell that only gets an array of items. Is there any alternative that will only return the 1 that exists?

thanks
Arkane

johanafm

If you don't have an id for the element you can't retrieve it directly.

$str = <<<EOS
<div id="content">
	<img id="one" src="/image.jpg" alt=""/>
	<span id="spancontainer">
		<img src="/imagetwo.jpg" alt=""/>
	</span>
	<img class="someclass" src=/imagethree.jpg alt="" />
</div>
EOS;
$dom = new DomDocument();
$dom->loadHTML($str);

// Get the span contained image
$span = $dom->getElementById('spancontainer');
$imgs = $span->getElementsByTagName('img');
$img = $imgs->item(0);				// If you know in what order it appears
echo $img->getAttribute('src') . '<br/>';

// Get the image with class attribute
$div = $dom->getElementById('content');
$imgs = $div->getElementsByTagName('img');

foreach($imgs as $img) {
	if ($img->hasAttribute('class') && !$img->hasAttribute('id'))
		echo $img->getAttribute('src') . '<br/>';
}

Things to look for when deciding how to retrieve things without id include the attribute list, node contents (i.e. child nodes, but not applicable for images), siblings and parent. Try to find the easiest way of determining that a certain node is the one you want, which could be "it's always the third element following one with an id" and then getElementById on the id element, then use nextSibling.